Curb expectations on province's grandiose homelessness strategy
Opinion
When is success not politically successful? When it is not living up to expectations.
In the past week or so, it has become patently clear the Manitoba government's efforts to remove homeless encampments and relocate residents to more stable, longer-term housing options with wraparound social services have not entirely lived up to expectations.
Winnipeg encampments cleared from the banks of the Red River near Waterfront Drive started to reappear as spring weather improved. For many of the people who live and work in those neighborhoods, the return of camps is not only disheartening, it is prompting concerns the NDP may have bitten off more than it can chew on this file.
MIKAELA MACKENZIE / FREE PRESS FILES
An encampment along the river near Waterfront Drive in December. Encampments have started to reappear in the area.
The disappointment centres on expectations created in January with release of Your Way Home, a multi-pronged program to relocate encampment residents to safer and more stable housing with a full array of health and social services.
In a news release announcing the initiative, Premier Wab Kinew said 'a 30-day timeline beginning in February … will see the government move one encampment at a time into housing, including 300 new social units that have been purchased and will be supported by non-profit organizations.'
There are a series of implications in this statement. Fairly interpreted, news media and the general public are fully entitled to believe the premier promised at least 300 people would be moved out of encampments — allowing many of them to be fully cleared — and into social housing within the first 30 days of the program launch.
That's what the government said in its news release. But that's not apparently what the government meant.
The fine print from Your Way Home states government has a 30-day timeline from first contact with a homeless person to relocation in social housing. It also says encampments will be cleared if and when enough of the people who call them home can be convinced to relocate.
At current count, 30 chronically homeless people have been moved into stable social housing.
Housing, Addictions and Homelessness Minister Bernadette Smith said in an interview Monday she believes Your Way Home is on schedule.
Smith said the problem is complex and it has proven difficult to find one kind of housing option that works for every homeless person. Although it's still early days, Smith noted she is encouraged that all 30 people who have been relocated from the encampments or other temporary shelters have remained in their new surroundings.
'One person housed is super important and we've got to celebrate that,' Smith said.
The minister is correct; this is a battle that will be fought one homeless person at a time and every person relocated long-term from the street to something more stable is a huge win. Still, without more effort to define what progress looks like on this file, the NDP government is likely to dash a lot of expectations and lose a lot of public support.
Few quibble with the goals of Your Way Home, or the basic construct. The homeless need more than emergency shelter; longer-term housing along with mental health and addictions treatment, education, job training and other social services is more or less the approach everyone wants to take.
However, homelessness advocates warned the province it did not have the available housing and social service capacity to undertake its ambitious agenda. Further, the province has been urged to invest significantly more money in supporting community organizations that are already working to support the homeless.
Where does that leave Your Way Home? In desperate need of better messaging.
This is a file that has suffered the burden of unreasonable expectations almost from the moment it became a signature pledge for the NDP during the 2023 provincial election campaign. You will remember that right out of the gate, Kinew promised his government would 'end chronic homelessness' in Manitoba over the next seven years.
Smith noted that this would mean permanently relocating roughly 700 people provincewide from emergency shelters and encampments to social housing. Over two terms.
At this point, the government's biggest mistake may have been promising to 'end chronic homelessness' and not just bring it under some form of control. This kind of political hyperbole recalls other foolish and ultimately unachievable claims.
A 1999 election promise by NDP leader Gary Doer pledged to 'end' hallway medicine. Over Doer's time as premier, the province did dramatically lower the number of patients warehoused on gurneys in ER hallways. But his government never ended the problem.
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The Kinew government may have fallen into the same trap.
It's not hard to imagine that, as Your Way Home brings more housing and supports online, it may come close to helping its target of 700 people. It's also quite easy to imagine that even with that accomplishment, the problem of chronic homelessness will have grown much larger.
Progress is not about hitting a preconceived number; it's about making the problem smaller.
And it's not yet clear the NDP are going to be able to do that.
dan.lett@freepress.mb.ca
Dan LettColumnist
Dan Lett is a columnist for the Free Press, providing opinion and commentary on politics in Winnipeg and beyond. Born and raised in Toronto, Dan joined the Free Press in 1986. Read more about Dan.
Dan's columns are built on facts and reactions, but offer his personal views through arguments and analysis. The Free Press' editing team reviews Dan's columns before they are posted online or published in print — part of the our tradition, since 1872, of producing reliable independent journalism. Read more about Free Press's history and mandate, and learn how our newsroom operates.
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